API access to a BSS system or Enterprise software opens up lots of integration opportunities. But what happens if you need to call multiple APIs in series and one fails? How do you roll back? LogiSense’s DataFlows provide that extra transactional control on your RESTful APIs.

Client Management vs API Management

Typically, when integrating with a system through an API the client software needs to manage and maintain all information related to data flow, order of operations and dependences. They need to ensure that any errors or failures can be handled. The API will handle all the base validation and operations to manage the object data. This difference means that the integrating client often requires a high level of management and maintenance especially when dealing with API changes. Take the example of a new customer and their first order. The client needs to ensure the customer account is created, their contact information, any contracts or commitments and then all the products or subscriptions they have agreed to purchase. The order of these objects being executed in just as important as handling and managing the results returned for each API call. Clients often spend more time developing their management approach than actually integrating with the BSS or Enterprise platform.

Transactional Behaviours

Many RESTful APIs have attempted to implement a method of preforming a series of API calls in a transaction. Whether this is starting a transaction with the generation of a transaction id and including it in all the calls and then invoking the commit or roll back once the set of operations are completed or some other invention. Even with these basic transaction approaches the client development still faces all the orchestration concerns previously described. The API platform has given them an ability to roll back but not full management.

Smart Operations & Why LogiSense Matters

LogiSense has created a Transaction Control process called DataFlows that enables multiple REST APIs requests to be managed in a single call to the server. This DataFlow can then own the transactional support we discussed and this process can allow for the related objects to automatically inherit any required references like a CustomerID when adding a contact to a customer account. Lastly, the DataFlow is smart. It will understand that you can’t compose a transaction that starts with adding a product to a customer before the customer object has been created. Instead of giving the client an error it preforms the operations in the order they are required when it matters.  With DataFlows LogiSense has provided API transactional control as well as given the client a way to simply focus on integration and not all the additional management overhead typically required.